Heuristic

In the spring of 2009, I took Online Systems with Dr. Roy Pargas. The class was project-based, and our end goal was to create a Web application written in C# .NET that contained a pedagogical emphasis.

I decided to address a problem I had during my freshman year at Clemson: time management. The program, called Scheduletastic, builds students' class and study schedules for them... since they're not likely to do it themselves. Algorithmically, Scheduletastic takes a heuristic approach; it relies on a bunch of idiosyncrasies in Clemson's class blocks to effectively match students in the same class with one another in distributed study groups.

There is also some really disgusting screen scraping of Clemson's Web portal involved. SISweb is not valid HTML, so a DOM traversal simply does not work. There are no closing tags on any element in any of the pages.

I published the project with Dr. Pargas as a poster in the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, and I traveled to Savannah, GA that February on a grant from Clemson's Calhoun Honors College to present the work.

Scheduletastic represents both my first conference experience and my first authorship. It was a blast.

CSCW 2010 two-page paper (PDF)

Abstract

Undergraduate students often have poor time management skills; this poster presents a time management approach specifically designed to meet their needs. Scheduletastic is a Web-based application that pre-populates students’ schedules by extracting data from their university’s Internet portal, including relevant class rosters and meeting times. The study times generated for each user are matched with those of peers in the same classes through the use of a best- case heuristic algorithm. This approach creates a product that encourages synergy and real-time collaboration, while requiring minimal resource investment by the user.